Conrad, Language, and Narrative

In this re-evaluation of the writings of Joseph Conrad, Michael Greaney places language and narrative at the heart of his literary achievement. A trilingual Polish expatriate, Conrad brought a formidable linguistic self-consciousness to the English novel; tensions between speech and writing are the defining obsessions of his career. He sought very early on to develop a ‘writing of the voice’ based on oral or communal modes of storytelling. Greaney argues that the ‘yarns’ of his nautical raconteur Marlow are the most challenging expression of this voice-centred aesthetic. But Conrad’s suspicion that words are fundamentally untrustworthy is present in everything he wrote. The political novels of his middle period represent a breakthrough from traditional storytelling into the writerly aesthetic of high modernism. Greaney offers an examination of a wide range of Conrad’s work which combines recent critical approaches to language in post-structuralism with an impressive command of linguistic theory.

• Wide ranging treatment of Conrad’s texts • The style of writing is lucid, engaging and jargon free • The study deploys key concepts from literary theory in an accessible way

Introduction; Part I. Speech communities: 1. ‘The realm of living speech’: Conrad and oral community; 2. ‘Murder by language’: ‘Falk’ and Victory; 3. ‘Drawing-room voices’: language and space in The Arrow of Gold; Part II. Marlow: 4. Modernist storytelling; ‘Youth’ and ‘Heart of Darkness’; 5. The scandals of Lord Jim; 6. The gender of Chance; Part III. Political communities: 7. Nostromo and anecdotal history; 8. Linguistic dystopia: The Secret Agent; 9. ‘Gossip, tales, suspicions’: Language and paranoia in Under Western Eyes; Conclusion.